Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

December 1962. I'm a junior in high school, and during Christmas break a chum and I revisit the grade school we graduated from two and a half years earlier. Lo and behold, there we find, in our old classroom, our eighth grade teacher, in mufti, along with his wife and daughter. "With a little more effort and attentiveness, Paul can accomplish much more than he presently is," is what he'd written on my report card in 1960. Man, did he have me figured. Check out my then-de rigueur white-socks-with-black-loafers and semi-peg pants. I was bound and determined to at least not dress like a dork. Self-timer Kodachrome with my new Retinette, its light leak as yet undiscovered and casting a fog on my friend. View full size.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.